The Significane of Roe v. Wade

Class on Monday was really eye-opening and engaging, and in talking more about the cases that led up to Roe v. Wade and the case itself, I've come to the conclusion that Roe v. Wade is more than just the case that legalized abortion. It's nuanced and done more to protect women, and in some ways has created more complications, but its largest contribution to our legislation is not the right to abortions, rather, the right to privacy.

I think the backlash in supreme court cases is always about the power of the state to have its own autonomy. It happened for the legalization of gay marriage as well, and during Brown v. Board too, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see another case that redefines our right to privacy in the modern context of technology.

Roe v. Wade became an influential case that leads to many other rulings that expanded women's rights and also, perhaps, more importantly, the right to privacy, mostly in personal and familial matters. An article in the National Women's Law Center attributes the right to procreate and obtain contraception, the right to marry, to maintain family relationships, to make decisions on how to raise and rear children, and the right to intimacy to the principle of privacy established by Roe v. Wade. An Op-Ed goes further and states that Roe v. Wade, "More than other Supreme Court decisions, it connected privacy to ideas about individual identity and choice. Whatever the flaws of the original decision, many hoped to use it to redefine who was thought to have autonomy and why" and goes on to list a few examples. The article goes on to talk about how conservatives have worked hard to rebrand the case as the case about abortion, rather than the founding case for privacy which is really interesting too.

However, the question still stands-- what does the right to privacy mean and who can claim it? Even now, privacy has meant different things to different people. For some, it means the ability to have an intimate and legally recognized relationship that may be outside of societal norms. For others, it's been translated to the right to have their personal information protected. It might be all of the above for us. Maybe as students, our right to privacy translates differently. Privacy can be correlated to our right to other freedoms, and maybe pushing for certain privacies will mean different things to us. It's nice to know that regardless of the details, we do have a right to privacy. Now we just have to figure out what that means.

https://nwlc.org/resources/even-more-abortion-constitutional-importance-roe-v-wade-and-right-privacy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/21/opinion/roe-v-wade-abortion.html

Also, I saw this on my feed the other day and just wanted to share.